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Brown Says He’ll Resign to Help Labour

Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain said on Monday that he intends to stand down as Labour Party leader.Credit
Matt Cardy/Getty Images

LONDON — Britain’s quest for a new government took a sudden turn on Monday when Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced that he would resign within months as Labour Party leader as part of a bid to lure the Liberal Democrats into rejecting the Conservatives and joining a rejuvenated Labour in a left-of-center governing coalition.

Speaking to reporters outside 10 Downing Street, Mr. Brown said he would remain in office to oversee negotiations for a new government, but would stand down as Labour’s leader when a successor was elected sometime before the party’s annual conference in September. His resignation would end 13 years as Labour’s chancellor of the Exchequer and prime minister.

Mr. Brown, a feisty, impatient man with little instinct for the demands of grass-roots politics, has been accused by his critics for years of being in deep denial about his unpopularity, both with Labour voters and more broadly. That chorus intensified after last week’s election, when he led Labour to its worst performance since the 1920s. But on Monday, he sounded chastened, and his plan to resign stunned many in his party and the country.

He said the election last Thursday had produced a hung Parliament “because no single party and no single leader” had secured a majority in the House of Commons, and that “as leader of my party I have to accept that as a judgment on me.” He added, “I have therefore asked the Labour Party to set in train the processes needed for its own leadership election.”

The move came after four days of inconclusive and often fractious talks on forming a new governing alliance between the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives, and threw the process of establishing a new government wide open. By sacrificing his own career, Mr. Brown appeared to have made a potentially game-changing move, though how it would work out in practice remained deeply uncertain.

Many in Labour were relieved, but his overture to the Liberal Democrats was met with disbelief among some senior Labour officials. A former minister, John Reid, described it as “potentially a disastrously wrong” decision that would be seen as a desperate effort to defy Labour’s popular rejection at the polls.

In his statement, Mr. Brown said he was responding to a request in a telephone call on Monday by Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, asking for the opening of “formal talks” between the two parties. But Mr. Clegg, conscious of the potential damage to the Liberal Democrats’ reputation as a party that shuns backroom deals, lost no time in issuing a demurral. He said he was not jilting the Conservatives, with whom negotiators from the Liberal Democrats had made “a good deal of progress,” but that it was “the right thing” to open discussions with Labour “on exactly the same basis” as with the Conservatives.

Photo

Gordon Brown’s announcement in late afternoon stunned many in his party and in the country. Credit
Matt Cardy/Getty Images

In practice, senior Liberal Democrat officials said that Mr. Clegg had come under mounting pressure from within his own party, whose left-of-center policies on many issues, the officials said, were more compatible with Labour’s policies than those of the Conservatives. Some disgruntled Liberal Democrats said Mr. Clegg was courting rebellion in the party by pushing ahead with the Conservatives, particularly as they had balked at the Liberal Democrats’ demand for a voting system reform that would give smaller parties a fairer share of seats in future elections.

For their part, the Conservatives reacted by sweetening their offer on changes in the voting system. The chief Conservative negotiator, William Hague, said his party would “go the extra mile” by offering the Liberal Democrats a referendum on a voting system known as alternative vote, a form of proportional representation, “so the people of this country can decide what is the best system.”

Mr. Brown’s move reflected the turmoil within the Labour Party since the election, in which it trailed badly behind the Conservatives. Several Labour members of Parliament had demanded publicly that Mr. Brown resign, and powerful members of his cabinet were said to have told him privately that he should go.

But British newspapers had reported that Mr. Brown was preparing a last-ditch effort to prolong his tenure as prime minister, which began when he succeeded Tony Blair in an internal Labour upheaval in 2007. He was said to have been encouraged by a group of loyal Labour cabinet ministers, who took to Britain’s airwaves over the weekend with the argument that the election had produced “a progressive majority,” with Labour and the Liberal Democrats combined winning 15.4 million votes compared to the Conservatives’ 10.6 million.

In the election campaign, with a hung Parliament looking likely, Mr. Brown did an abrupt about-face on the voting system, in an apparent bid to draw the Liberal Democrats to Labour’s side. He said he favored the abandonment of Britain’s first-past-the-post voting system to one of several European-style systems of proportional representation, under which the number of seats won by any party more closely correlates with its vote share. The proposal is one that many election experts think could hurt Labour more than the Conservatives.

In his statement, Mr. Brown made it clear on Monday that he had come down on the side of Labour cabinet ministers, mostly left-wingers, who have argued viscerally against handing power to the Conservatives. He said there was “a progressive majority in the country,” and that it was Labour’s duty, as well as “in the national interest,” to explore whether that could be translated into a new governing coalition with the Liberal Democrats.

But political commentators said the Labour move faced heavy odds. The logic underpinning talks between the Conservatives and the Liberals Democrats has been that their combined 363 seats in the Commons — 306 for the Conservatives, 57 for the Liberal Democrats — would constitute a clear majority of at least 37.

But if Labour, with 258 seats, combined with the Liberal Democrats, they would be short of the 326 seats required for a majority by 11 seats, and dependent for survival on attracting the support of small political parties and blocs, including regional groups from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland that would be likely to demand a heavy price for their support, in government subsidies and other programs.

Mr. Brown’s plan to quit set the stage for what could be a bitter Labour leadership fight, with the candidates likely to include the home secretary, Alan Johnson; the foreign secretary, David Miliband; the education minister, Ed Balls; the deputy prime minister, Harriet Harman; and a popular left-wing Labour backbencher, Jon Cruddas, who has argued that Labour needs to return to its working-class roots.

Correction: May 13, 2010

An article on Tuesday about negotiations among British political parties on forming a coalition government following the inconclusive May 6 parliamentary elections misspelled the surname of the chief negotiator for the Conservatives. He is William Hague, not Haig.

A version of this article appears in print on May 11, 2010, on page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: Brown Says He’ll Resign to Help Labour Join Coalition. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe